This article sets out to examine the effect of utilizing different culturally-based materials on EFL university students' foreign language reading anxiety, reading comprehension self-efficacy, and reading proficiency within project-based classes. The research was carried out with two classes of intermediate freshmen majoring in English Language Teaching. The comparison group had to present thei...

The present study investigated the well acknowledged phenomenon of a different sense of emotionality in a person's first (L1) and second language (L2). Event-related potentials were recorded during the reading of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral words in L1 and L2. Enhanced processing of both emotional compared to neutral words was reflected in an amplified early posterior negativity (EPN) abou...

the present study investigated any probable relationship between theidentity processing styles and l2 literacy of advanced persian efl learners. theparticipants included 160 (female = 109, male = 51) advanced efl iranian learners.the instruments used included a simulation of the toefl ibt test, measuring theparticipants’ l2 literacy-related proficiency, reading, and writing, and the identitysty...

This longitudinal study tracked the neuro-cognitive changes associated with second language (L2) grammar learning in adults in order to investigate how L2 processing is shaped by a learner's first language (L1) background and L2 proficiency. Previous studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have argued that late L2 learners cannot elicit a P600 in response to L2 grammatical structures that...

This study investigated whether and how university students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge i.e., epistemological beliefs affected L2 academic reading ability directly and/or indirectly via self-regulated learning strategies. EFL college students (n =196) answered the reading section of a TOEFL test, two parts of Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire and Epistemological Beliefs...

In this study an attempt was made to construct a multi-factor model predicting the development of reading literacy in the upper grades of primary school in the Netherlands for subgroups of 729 first language (L1) learners and 93 second language (L2) learners. Following a longitudinal design, it was explored to what extent the variation in reading literacy development in L1 and L2 from grade 4 t...

This study investigated how resource-demanding reading tasks and stressful conditions affect 1stlanguage (L1) and intermediate 2nd-language (L2) reading comprehension. Using the attentional control theory framework (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007), we investigated the roles of central executive working memory (WM) resources, reading task difficulty, trait reading anxiety, and social ...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

Reading is claimed to be the major source of vocabulary growth in L1, but is it also the main source of L2 vocabulary? This paper surveys some experiments in acquiring L2 vocabulary from reading that report very small vocabulary gains from short and long texts. By comparison, reading supplemented with word-focused tasks yields better results. Similarly, when reading is compared with a word-focu...